On Mon, 11 Aug 2014 03:04:41 -0400, Andrew Godfrey <[email protected]> wrote:
Reminder: The PR is ready for review:
https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/dlang.org/pull/623
Jonathan has summarized his position in the commments.
What do the rest of you think?
H. S. Teoh, Jakob, Ali, Marc, Dominikus, Chris -
your impression of whether this clears up the confusion would
help round out the feedback.
Sorry to be chiming in late on this.
As the author of the article, I stand by my terminology, even if it's not
"official." In fact, when I was writing the article, I was struggling to
describe how arrays worked until I stumbled into that description, and
then it all clicked pretty well.
This issue has come up before, and I can't remember what the result was,
but I am not severely attached to the terminology if it hurts the
documentation of D (In other words, I'm willing to allow a pull request to
the article on dlang's site if it is what people want). As I recall, I was
in favor of changing the official definition (though not the advocate of
it), but most were not. I think the definition of dynamic array as most
languages define it, and dynamic array as D defines it, are not exactly at
odds with each other, but the differences are significant.
What is needed is a nice term for "reference to a chunk of data." I
thought slice fit that bill nicely, but I can see how it would be
confusing.
The fact that slices act sort of like dynamic arrays, even though they may
not even point at arrays at all, is a very awkward definition. It would be
like calling all C pointers arrays.
-Steve
